Category Archive

Compatibility View Sometimes the website you’re visiting doesn’t look right. It shows up as a jumble of out-of-place menus, images, and text boxes. What’s going on? One possible explanation: The site might have been designed for an earlier version of Internet Explorer. If Internet Explorer recognizes that the webpage isn’t compatible, you’ll see the Compatibility View button on the Address bar. Try …

What exactly is “flat design?” For those of you who haven’t heard of the term, “flat design” is mainly the term given to the style of design in which elements lose any type of stylistic characters that make them appear as though they lift off the page. In laymen’s terms, this means removing stylistic characters such as drop shadows, gradients, …

Doing product design in a huge organization is tricky. Clear, constant communication is imperative. A few years ago at Salesforce, that mostly meant hours upon hours of creating static redline specs. I didn’t go to school for this stuff, but burning the midnight oil to label CSS attributes across hundreds of screens seemed really, really broken. via Designing Products That …

UXPSI also includes some new checks on UX issues, like legibility, viewports and touch targets. Screwing up UX I am less forgiving of, and so if anything is picked up I’d say the advice should be heeded. Not pure performance, no, but arguably a form of performance is getting out of the person’s way so they can actually do the …

The Rule of Threes One of the most important concepts in wilderness survival is understanding survival priorities. Modern research brings us the Rule of Threes, a principle that can make the difference between life and death. The Rule of Threes puts our survival needs into perspective, and though they are rough approximations of time, they are an easy way to …

Progress, Not Perfection In his presentation Breaking Good Habits, Harry Roberts accurately states that “CSS is such a mess that even when you clean it up, it’s still a mess.” Our goal is to make our CSS better, not perfect. So look at each of these approaches with an open mind. Remember, the point is not to drive yourself crazy …

Rise of the Pegasus – Wayne Greenwood Unicorns were the big story of the last few years, referring to designers who added production-level coding chops to their skill sets. Unicorns being rare by definition, an even larger population of designers—call them the thoroughbreds—focused their energies solely on interaction design, visual design, and prototyping, leaving the production code to the engineers. …